Whoever chose, six years ago, to invest nine dollars in Assaf Voll's book A History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era, would have easily been able to devour all the pages in this epic in no time at all. The book begins with the memorable quote of Seinfeld's George Louis Costanza: "Just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it", and follows this with 120 empty pages "depicting" Palestinian history. Amazon removed this work from its shelves following the cries of "gewalt" issued by the Palestinians, but only after the book reached first place in Amazon's category of "Israel and Palestine History".
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Israel's minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who only a few days ago shoved a similar historical truth in the face of the Palestinians – "There's no such thing as the Palestinian People" – is in good company. Voll might have opted for a gimmick, but Israel's late prime minister, Goldar Meir, used the exact same words fifty years ago, as did Newt Gingrich, a former Republican politician and speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Gingrich referred to the Palestinians as "an invented people who want to destroy Israel", "Arabs who migrated to Israel during the Ottoman Empire period...". When US President Obama disagreed with him, Gingrich scoffed at him, describing the administration as: "so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit".
Even Arab and Palestinian leaders have been known to admit the truth in a slip of the tongue. Perhaps the most outstanding example of this is that of Zuheir Mohsen, one of the leaders of the as-Sa'iqa faction of the PLO, who was targeted by the Mossad, but left us with an unparalleled heritage: "The Palestinian people do not exist," Mohsen explained to the Dutch newspaper Trouw back in 1977. "The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism."
And so Smotrich, even though his name is Smotrich, is absolutely right. "The Palestinian People", as he put it, "is an invention less than one hundred years old", and if anybody is genuinely entitled to the title of being Palestinian, then that would be his grandfather, a 13th-generation resident of Jerusalem, along with a number of other grandfathers and grandmothers with whom I am personally acquainted. The imaginary, or more correctly the late, or extremely late "Palestinians", migrated here en masse in the late 19th century and throughout the years of the British Mandate, and they had no idea at the time that they were "Palestinians" or that they were a "People".
From Egypt to MasterChef
At the time, not a single one of them claimed, as did former Palestinian politician Saeb Erekat (who passed away two years ago) who lived in Jericho together with his family 3,000 years before the People of Israel came to the city under the leadership of Joshua. None of them regarded themselves as the descendants of the Jebusites or the Philistines. Many of the "Palestinian" migrants recognized the Jewish history surrounding the Land of Israel and the Jewish birthright to the land. At that time, they did not turn Jesus into a Palestinian preaching Islam rather than Christianity, as their current counterparts' nonsensical claims would have us believe, and they never even contemplated making claims to be the original natives of this land.
How do we know this to be the case? It's simple. They themselves talk about this on a thousand and one random and sometimes less random occasions. Take for example Ms. Salma Fiomi, a resident of the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qassem, who demonstrated her culinary skills on the popular TV competitive cooking show MasterChef. On the show, Fiomi proudly presented her version of Koshari – a popular Egyptian dish of rice and lentils. "My family", explained Fiomi, "came from Egypt, from Al-Fayoum, and I, Salma Fiomi, come from Al-Fayoum."
Another prime example that doesn't really leave much room for interpretation can be seen in the words of Fathi Hamad, the former minister of the interior in the Hamas government, who urged Egypt to provide help during IDF Operation Returning Echo in the Gaza Strip in March 2012. "When we call for your help," he explained, "It is with the aim of continuing the jihad. Praise Allah – All our us have Arab roots, and every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip and throughout Palestine is able to prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or anywhere else. We have blood ties... Personally, half of my family is from Egypt. Where is your mercy? More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis."
Dozens of books and records left behind by visitors to the Land of Israel clearly illustrate that at the turn of the last century, the land was desolate and empty, and the alleged "Palestinian People" migrated here only following the renewal of Jewish settlement in Israel as part of the modern Return to Zion in the 19th century. This is the case in the famous research of Israel's former President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi on the Ottoman period. This is also true of American journalist, Joan Peters, author of the book From Time Immemorial, who estimated that at the beginning of the First Aliyah in 1882, there were some 141 thousand non-Jews only living in the Land of Israel. The works of the Hebrew University's Professor Moshe Ma'oz also support this view, underscoring the fact that for centuries the number of Arabs living here in Israel never exceeded 100 thousand.
Ze'ev Galili's research further develops this approach, as he arrived at the following, logical conclusion: if towards the end of the 19th century, there were about 100 thousand Arabs living in Israel, this means that in the seventy years that elapsed from that point to 1948, the Arab population increased twelvefold, and the only way to explain such an increase is that it was the result of mass immigration from neighboring states.
Nations that must invent
Anthony Smith, the renowned sociologist and Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics, once distinguished between two types of national identity. The first type includes nations with a core identity based on culture and history, and the second – nations without any such nucleus that are required to invent everything from nothing.
We belong to the first type while the Palestinians belong to the second type. It is as simple as that. This is essentially what Smotrich said, and Smotrich, even though his name is Smotrich, was right on this occasion. The Al-Masri clan migrated here from Egypt, the Al-Mughrabi clan from Algeria, Al-Turki from Turkey, Al-Iraqi from Iraq who settled in Taibeh, and the Al-Ajami clan from Iran. The Kna'an family in Nablus does not hail from the historical Land of Canaan but rather from Aleppo in Syria. As the renowned researcher, Pinhas Inbari, has suggested, the Erekat family from Jericho originates from the large Al-Huwaytat tribe that moved from Medina and then settled in Jordan, as well as in Abu-Dis and in Jericho. Thus, it is clear that they all came from the immediate "neighborhood".
The term "Palestinian People", in relation to the Arabs living in Israel, appeared for the first time in 1964, in the PLO Charter. The outrageous UNRWA definition, according to which the minimum seniority required in Israel in order to define an individual as a Palestinian refugee (both him and his descendants) amounts to two years, still does not qualify to turn the Palestinians into a people.
The Palestinians have almost no unique defining trait. Neither religion nor language, and no common ethnic background or history and shared homeland. If you take the trouble to examine the long-winded, multi-clause definition that UNESCO contributed to the term "people", you will also discover that the Palestinians do not meet the majority of them.
"The Palestinian People" was created especially for us, only following the Shivat Zion ("Return to Zion") movement and the subsequent renewed Jewish settlement in Israel, in an attempt to wipe us off the map along with our unbroken, thousands-of-years-old bond with this land. There is really no need to waste any words on our roots to the Land of Israel, in stark contrast with the fake roots that the Palestinians have tried to put down. Our history is manifestly documented in the chronicles of history, in the Bible, undeniably etched in archeology and research. We have no need for inventions and historical forgeries. As the 19th-century British statesman and social reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, so aptly put it 180 years ago, we returned as a "people without a land to a land without a people".
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